Pleading for Obedience

Well, thank you, Connelly, for inviting me here. It's a pleasure to meet you. We've got some connection between our churches. And it's always great to remember that we have unity in Christ with our brothers and sisters who worship in other churches.

And so I always love getting to visit another church. And I am grateful that you guys have an evening service. And so as we come to the, I really am, and as we come to the word, it's helpful to remember just how much we need to be reminded and shaped by the word again and again and again.

And that is why many churches throughout history have chosen to have an evening service where we can have a second time to tune our hearts to what God's word has for us. And so let us try to focus ourselves upon Psalm 119 and see how it might speak to us today.

Reading Psalm 119 and the Call to Be Shaped by God’s Word

So let's go ahead and stand for the reading of God's word. We'll read the first five verses.

Psalm 119.

Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole heart, who also do no wrong but walk in his ways. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently.

Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. Amen, you may be seated. Let's pray as we begin. Father in heaven, thank you for this day. We thank you for your word. We thank you for your law, Lord, and we do pray that you would work in us today.

Please speak to us, teach us, help me in my preaching, help us in our hearing to know you better. In Jesus' name, amen. I have a question for you. What would make you happy? You've probably thought about that many times, maybe even today.

I was a middle school teacher before, and when you teach middle school, you have to keep people's attention. So if this were a middle school class, I would ask you to take out a piece of paper and a pen and make a list of the things that you believe would make you happy, right here, right now.

Maybe you could number them out. Is there anything in your life that you would change that if this thing could just be altered, maybe this thing that is causing me pain and agony and stress, if I could just take that away, then I would truly live a happy life.

Or maybe it's something that you don't have. Maybe you see something in the lives of others and you think if I could just add this thing to my life, it would help me so, so much and I could finally live a life of happiness.

So what is it? What is it for you? What is coming to your mind? Just allow me to change this one thing. I wonder as you imagine that thing, if anyone in here had on their list, obedience to the word of God.

And I would be happy if I could obey the law of God. You might think to yourself, whoa, you said happy. I know I should obey the law of God. I know that deep down I'm a Christian and I should have a life of obedience, but you asked me what would make me happy.

Now, wasn't that a different question? And yet, look at the first words of this Psalm. It says the word blessed. And that word means more than happy. There's a depth to this word, but it certainly includes the idea of happiness.

And the Psalmist says that blessed are those whose way is blameless. And so obedience, says the Psalmist, is the way to happiness. And so the question for us today is, do you agree? Do you agree with the Psalmist?

And so our goal then is if we know in our hearts that we have areas in our life where we're full of temptation and desires that are unlawful, our goal then is to come to this Psalm and to be moved. To say with the Psalmist that his law is good and eventually be moved to pray from the heart the words of verse five.

Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes. So let's get acquainted to Psalm 119. Go ahead and turn to verse 97. It's the only Psalm where you have to turn a few pages just to get to the middle of the Psalm.

If I were to pick just one verse that encapsulates the heart of the Psalm, I think this would be it. It says this in Psalm, sorry, in verse 97. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day.

The Love of God’s Law in Psalm 119

The Psalm is a meditation. It's 176 verses of extended, prolonged, beautiful harmony that's all sustained by one driving thought and that is love for God's law. And so we wanna learn to have the same heart that the Psalmist has and share that same love for God's word, but what does he mean by the law?

So we need to understand that if we're gonna pray this from the heart, that word law can be used in different senses and I think it's used in different senses in this Psalm. He uses eight words throughout the Psalm to refer to kind of a related collection of God's word, his commands, his statutes.

The words of this, it's law, these are the English translations, law, word, testimonies, commandments, judgments, decrees, precepts, and promise. So those are the words that are the center of what this Psalm is about and they're evenly dispersed throughout the Psalm and I think when you look at it, you see that he's giving us a whole panoply of the goodness of God's word and all of its facets and so we wanna learn to love the law in the same ways that he does.

And so there's a broad sense that the word law is used. Sometimes, and this I think is the sense in many of the verses, the sense is all of scripture. So the Psalmist loves all of God's word and all of its forms.

Think about the different types of literature.

There's narrative.

Well, we can say with the Psalmist, we love the narratives of scripture. It reveals to us our sinful hearts. It shows us God's plan of salvation. It points us forward to the one who saves us. We love the law of God when we think about the storyline of scripture.

We also love the poetry, the poetry sections of scripture which move our hearts. We love the wisdom which gives us guidance on how to live. And we love the prophecy which teaches us of how God is working amongst his people.

And so in this broad sense, I love your law, I love your word, all of scripture. All right, we can say yes and amen with the Psalmist. And there's also a narrower sense of the word when it's referring to the commandments.

The Psalmist loves the commandments of God, the do's and don'ts. And so this is where things can get a little bit tricky for people, especially in kind of our modern evangelical world where there's a confused relationship.

How is it that we love the commandments as new covenant Christians? Have you noticed this? That there can be a sense in many large churches that find a way of bringing many people in that, you know, all these people who are talking and focused on obedience, maybe they just don't understand grace.

If they really understood grace, then we wouldn't be so concerned about God's commands for us. After all, doesn't Romans 6, verse 14 say that we are under grace? You're not under law, but you're under grace.

And so we need to have an understanding of these things in our minds so that we can read the Psalm. I mean, is this Psalm just for, that was great for the Psalmist, but now under the new covenant, we have a different tone to our prayers.

We no longer pray things like verse 97, oh, how I love your law. So what does it mean to be under law, sorry, under grace, but not under law? What then is our relationship to the law? I think there's a lot that we can say about that.

I wanna just point out two scriptures that help to clarify the relationship of new covenant Christians to the law. You can turn if you like, I'll read it to Ezekiel 36. So in Ezekiel 36, and I'll read from verse 26, this is a prophecy about the new covenant.

So what will happen when the new covenant comes? God says this through Ezekiel, God says, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

So that's grace, right? That's what happens under the new covenant. The grace of God replaces our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh. And so now what happens? Verse 27, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

So you see, is being under grace mean we now have a relationship to the law that causes us to ignore it? No, you see here in this passage, it says that when the new covenant comes, when the new heart comes, it will cause us to walk in his statutes.

We'll actually maybe even have a heightened sense of desire and love to God that causes us to walk in obedience. So that's looking forward to the new covenant. How does Paul talk about this? Consider Titus chapter two.

Titus chapter two, Paul writes, for the grace of God has appeared.

There it is.

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people.

What does that do?

Training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age. And so the megachurch pastor who believes that grace and obedience are somehow contrary to each other, can you see that they're missing the mark?

When the new covenant comes, we of all people in Christ, we've actually been given the heart to obey from the heart, you see? So we can say with the psalmist then, and in the broad sense and in the narrow sense of the commands, the do's and don'ts, oh, how I love your law.

It is my meditation all the day. And so that brings us to the question of self-examination. Do we, like the psalmist, love the law of God? Here's an illustration to examine yourself, to see if this matches the way that you and I think about the law.

Some of you are probably familiar with the Greek epic, The Odyssey. And there's a story in this where Odysseus is, might get some details wrong, I never actually read it. Odysseus is, he's sailing by this island, and he's heard that there are these songs, there are these siren singers on this island, and that ship captains, as they've gone past it, and they've heard the siren songs, they've become so entranced by it, and so taken that they desire to know what these sounds are, that they run their ships ashore to their destruction and to their death.

And so Odysseus has heard of this, and he decides to prepare his crew. And he orders that all of his crew get wax and put in their ears so that they're not able to hear anything, and he says, put your head down and row, row for your lives.

But for Odysseus, he wants to hear. He wants to hear what all of the fuss is about. And so he chooses to have himself tied to the mast of the ship, so that he would be able to hear, but he wouldn't be able to follow them to his own destruction.

And so now as they approach, he begins to hear the siren songs, and his heart is just absolutely given over to these siren songs, and he starts just,.

What's the word?

He's rustling, he's rustling against the ropes. He wants more than anything to be freed from the shackle of these ropes that he would go after the sirens. And so here's the question for us. Do we see the law of God in that way?

Our hearts are panting after sin, but yet the law is restraining us. It's keeping us from what we really want to do. Is that a sufficient view of the law, hearts desirous of sin, and hating the ropes that hold us back?

Is that what the psalmist is teaching? Well, I think it's clearly an insufficient view of the law, and so if that's how we think, and I know it's how I think sometimes, we need correction from God's word.

And so let us walk through the first five verses of this psalm and seek to change our thinking that we might think rightly about these things. So the first three verses form a banner for the whole psalm.

Blessed are those, that's how it begins. Blessed are those, so here it is. Come everyone, you want the blessed life, here it is. Blessed are those whose way is blameless. You think to yourself, uh-oh, I'm not blameless.

Now, this psalm surely is not for me. Well, I think it's important to note that that word blameless does not mean sinless. So the word blameless is used in scripture to talk about people who are sinners, just like you and I.

Noah, for example, was described as blameless. Job calls himself blameless. Then there's a Greek word and equivalent to it in the New Testament that's used of John the Baptist's parents, calls them blameless.

And so the sense here is not sinlessness, not necessarily a completely unattainable standard, but the sense seems to be that of integrity. So blessed is the one who walks in integrity. And so what does integrity mean?

Well, basically what is on the outside, it's basically a reflection of what is on the inside. There's a truthfulness and a consistency to the one who is described as blameless. And isn't it obvious that that is the blessed path?

I mean, what a burden it is when we have secret sin hidden in the heart, when I know that my outward persona is completely different from what is on the inside. And so blessed is the one who walks in integrity.

There's a consistency of life. Then the second part of the verse says, blessed are those who walk in the law of the Lord. And so blessed are you when there's gonna be a consistency, a walking in the ways that the Lord has set before us.

I think this is a helpful verse to keep in mind when so many Christians seem to think of the Christian life as something past. I went to a vacation Bible study and I gave my life to Christ. Sure, I'm not going to church.

Sure, I don't read my Bible. Sure, I don't really care what the Bible says, but there was that one time when I gave my heart to Christ and the preacher, they baptized me and they said, you're good to go.

So, so often people are encouraged in their Christian life just by saying, remember that time 20 years ago? But yet the verse here, and it's consistent, I think, with the whole of scripture, describes the Christian life as a walk.

We are to walk in the ways of the Lord. And so as we examine ourselves, we don't look back to that one time. We see how is our walk? Are we walking in faith?

Are you believing now?

And are you walking in a way that is consistent with that belief? Consider 1 John 1, in verse six, says this, if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. And the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. So we see the Christian life is a walk. Blessed are you whose way is blameless, and blessed are you who walk in the law of the Lord.

Verse two, blessed are those who keep his testimonies, who seek him with their whole hearts. This is my favorite verse of confrontation to the spirit of the age, the American spirit. Consider that word testimony.

This calls to mind, right, something that is testifying against you. So it's, and this is God's word to us. It's an objective standard that comes from God. It's outside of us. It doesn't actually depend on how I feel about it.

So it's a testimony against us, and what are we to do with our heart? We're to seek him with the whole heart. So my heart, I wanna conform my heart to the testimonies. Have you ever noticed how our culture completely flips those things?

Maybe it's not a flipping. There's more like a denial of this, okay? So the idea, the American version of this verse would be there are no testimonies. There's no objective standard. There's no law outside of yourself that you ought to conform yourself to, and therefore, you should seek to follow your own heart.

Follow your own heart.

Have you ever heard that?

Right, that's kind of like the key. Oh, I actually just read last night someone published a Unbeliever's 10 Commandments, and I think that was one of the commandments was to follow your own heart, okay?

If you go to college, you've probably heard this a lot. I remember one time when I was an unbeliever, I was talking to this woman, and I was divulging my problems to her for some reason, and I had made some foolish decisions, and I needed to make some more decisions to try to set a better course for my life, and I was struggling with what to do, and she told me in a moment of trying to help me, she said, I just want you to know that whatever you decide is right.

If you follow your heart, you cannot be wrong. Isn't that terrible advice? I mean, I had followed my heart to get me into this mess, so just keep following it, right? Just keep on keeping on. This is actually wonderful news to us.

If there's any young people here, maybe you'll go to college someday, and you'll have some professor who tells you all that matters is that you follow your heart. Well, you need to remember that the Bible says that our hearts, we don't like to accept this, we don't like to believe it, but it's true.

Our hearts are wicked, and when we follow our heart, it leads us into bad places, and so what we actually need is these things in verse two, these testimonies, these things from God, these commands, this word, and this direction to us, and so you don't follow your heart.

You take your heart, and with your whole heart, you seek the Lord. You seek to conform your life to his testimonies, and so if you ever have a college professor who tells you that this is the way of blessedness, to seek your own heart, you can read this verse to him.

No, I wanna seek the testimonies of the Lord, and you can tell your pastor to talk to that professor as well. Okay, verse three, blessed are those who also do no wrong, but walk in his ways. Blessed are you when you do no wrong.

This is a good verse to keep in mind when we want to do wrong. I'm guessing everyone in here is probably tempted, maybe not, if now you can think of some temptation that is gripping at your heart. Maybe today, at least this week, we're all tempted in many ways, and we think in our sinful flesh, I'll be blessed if I can just have a little bit of this wrong, if I could maybe just keep all these other areas of my life and just indulge this sin, then I'll be living the blessed life.

Well, we need to know that sin is a liar, and it always hides the consequences from us. And so, what is actually true when your sin is harping at you, this'll be good, this'll be good, this'll be good, this'll make you happy, this'll make you happy, no, it won't, verse three, blessed are those who do no wrong.

And so, the sin that you're tempted to won't make you happy. In fact, it'll lead you further and further towards destruction. So, if we take these three verses collectively, they can do two things for us.

One is that it's a little bit, there's a little bit of tension here, right, because we're setting out a standard of God's word that is hard to imagine, and one of the things that when we see this great standard, it can help point us to Christ, right?

I see how the law actually condemns me. Do these three verses condemn you, or do you think to yourself, yeah, that's pretty much how I pray all the time, right? So, we have contradictory attitudes towards the law of God, and we actually need forgiveness for that.

And so, it can point us to the one who these three verses were completely true for. Think about the Lord Jesus Christ, blessed are those whose way is blameless. Well, He was truly the blameless one. Blessed are those who keep His testimonies.

You know the Lord Jesus, He kept every single testimony of God His Father, who seek Him with their whole heart. The fullness of the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ, 100 was committed to the testimonies of His Father.

Isn't that amazing?

Have any of us coveted today?

Wanted something that wasn't ours? The Lord Jesus never coveted once in His entire life. And so, as we look through these things, they actually can give us a picture of the life of Christ, living out the blessed life, and He does it for us.

And so, we think, okay, He did it for us, and so now, I've got no relationship to the law. That's that thing that I talked about at the beginning. And so, the second thing we remember as we look at Christ as the standard, is we now follow Him.

Jesus says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And so, we wanna follow our model, our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, there's one more verse before we get to the prayer where we're trying to land today, and there's an important shift here.

Wonder if you noticed something different about verse four. See that first word?

It says, you.

You have commanded your precepts. So, the first three verses, this is why I said they're a banner for the psalm. So, the first three verses are general. It's like these general truths. And then, now it shifts.

The psalmist is no longer speaking generally,.

But he speaks to God.

He now shifts into prayer. You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. Isn't this a great thing for us to see? We can so often, this is a big risk for, if there's any fellow seminary students or theology nerds or pastors, right?

We can get so used to talking about God that we forget that we need to talk to God, right? So, if you take the truths of the first three verses,.

You go, boom, boom, boom, got it, got it, got it.

Okay, now I'm gonna go argue online about these things. But what the psalmist actually does, these truths are getting into his mind and it causes him to worship, to offer praise to God. These laws, they're not just, and this is important for our obedience, they're not just these abstract general principles.

You have commanded them. These are words from the God who knows you and loves you. These are his words. That's God's law. It's not just some random standard. And so this is a part of our love for God's law is to know the one who gave the law.

You have commanded your precepts to be kept diligently. This is a personal prayer. And by the way, that's the rest of the psalm. There's only one other verse, right? We've got 176 verses. And there's only one other verse that isn't directed to God.

So this is entirely a prayer after the first three verses. So let that be something that teaches us how to order our thinking life and our praying life. And so where does all this keep us? We've got four verses that extol God's law and God's word, and we consider our own hearts.

And so we'll be relieved. Whatever tension you feel here, it seems like it's actually shared by the psalmist. So what do I do with my disobedient and distracted heart? Well, you take it to verse five.

And now having seen the goodness of God's law, knowing how far short I fall, we pray this. Oh, that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.

Can you see that?

So it's like the psalmist, he's drilling these things into his mind, right? These things are true. I'll be, it's actually the blessed life. The blameless life is the blessed life.

Walking in the law of the Lord.

Is the way to true happiness, right? A pure heart of devotion to the Lord and walking in his ways. And then from that, he now needs to pray that these things would get into his heart, okay? So that's the model for our prayers.

And I think it's very encouraging, isn't it? That even the psalmist senses this tension here. There's a tension all throughout this psalm. It's full of exaltation of God's law. And then there's these prayers where he's just urging God to give him the strength from the heart to comply.

Verse 10 says this, with my whole heart I seek you. That's an amazing statement, isn't it? With my whole heart I seek you.

And then right after the comma,.

Let me not wander from your commandments. Verse 18, open my eyes. We need God to open our eyes if we're gonna see these things. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Verse 25, my soul clings to the dust.

So the psalmist isn't just riding high with this optimistic sense of like, oh, I'm just spiritually great all of the time. My soul clings to the dust, so God give me life according to your word. And so there's this tension here which should be incredibly encouraging to us.

He shows us how to think about the truthfulness of God's word, and then we take those truths and turn them into prayer because we are utterly dependent on the strength to come from God if we are to grow in these ways.

Prayer, Dependence, and the Church’s Witness

And so the psalmist also teaches us dependence and prayer. And so a couple really basic applications. What do we do now with this verse? Well, pray this for yourself. We can pray that the Lord would actually increase our appetite for his word.

Do you have appetites for things? How many of you, does anyone like football here? Okay, if you like football or just replace whatever your hobby is, you don't need to be told, man, I really need to watch some football right now.

I know that that would be good. You just do it because you have an appetite for watching football. Well, we need to pray that God would give us an appetite for his word that we would run to it again and again.

So use this psalm to form our prayer life. Okay, second thing is you can pray this for one another. Does the law of God inform your prayers for your brothers and sisters? We're often praying for people's physical problems.

I pray that you would cure my friend Ian's toe, okay? Well, if he had a toe problem, I would hope that the Lord would cure it, but we can actually use the standards of God's word and pray that God would fulfill these things in the lives of our brothers and sisters.

So it helps give us a guide for our own prayer life. It helps us to know how we can pray for one another. And then I wanna also mention that this is the last thing that we can pray this for the church collectively, that the church would be the sort of place where God's word and God's law is exalted.

Our whole culture is anti-law. They despise the law of God. Well, we don't want the church to reflect that same sentiment because we can't think clearly about these things or we're squeamish about them.

We actually want the church to be the type of place where God's law is exalted and held out in all of its beauty and goodness. And so we remember that God didn't create us to be Lone Ranger Christians, to be living the Christian life, trying to hold ourselves up by our bootstraps.

He actually calls us into community where we can help and strengthen one another. So we need the reminders from one another. Say, brother, sister, I know you're tempted. I know you wanna follow after that sin, but that sin is lying to you.

You will be blessed if you seek the Lord in this temptation, you confess it, and you follow after him. Don't we need each other to be reminding us of these things? And so the church is a witness to each other, is also a witness to the world of the goodness of God's law.

Consider the Odysseus story again. There's another person who goes past the island with the siren songs, a man named Jason. And Jason employs a different strategy to protect himself. Rather than using wax in the ears and ropes to restrain himself, he brings along a musician.

And he orders the musician to play the most beautiful song so that instead of hearing and being tempted by the sirens, he would be drowned out by the beauty of this song. And so can't that be a picture of what the church does for one another?

That we actually sing of the beauty of God's law and of his ways? We sing it so often and so frequently that we're not gonna be tempted by the sirens of sin, right? I don't wanna go to the left. I don't wanna go to the right because my church is reminding me again and again of how great God's word is, how great God's ways are.

And so we sing that song to ourselves. We sing it to one another that we might stand in the moment of temptation. And so I think that's a picture of how the church can hold out God's law and encourage one another.

And so therefore, we can pray that God would do this amongst his people and in his churches, that we would be the type of people who, with our worship and our lives, that we sing to one another and to the watching world.

We sing the words of verse 97, oh, how we love your law. It is our meditation all the day.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for your love and thank you for your word. We do pray that you would help us to see and to understand the beauty of your ways. Please forgive us of our sin and the ways that we so often go astray.

Please help us to have a better view of your law and its goodness. Help us to love you more. Help us to love the Lord Jesus Christ. Please cause us to grow today, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.